


Assunta

by kmo



Series: mio babbino caro [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Fatherhood, incarceration, murder baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-22
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-04-10 16:54:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4399841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kmo/pseuds/kmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal receives word of his daughter's birth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Assunta

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel to my earlier fic, Incinta, which I recommend reading before this one. Diverges with canon around "Dolce" though is consistent with Hannibal's capture in "Digestivo." 
> 
> Bedelia only makes a small appearance in this fic, but it's still a bedannibal fic all the way.

The orderly shoves the packet of mail through his food slot, the steel trap of it snapping up with a clang. Receiving mail has become a ceremonious occasion for Hannibal. Any correspondence addressed to him is first sent to the FBI to be x-rayed, tested, photographed, and scanned for posterity. Then, it is delivered to the hospital, where Frederick Chilton scrutinizes each letter and parcel in his attempt to crack Hannibal’s psyche like an anemic squirrel after a particularly hard walnut. Finally, at Frederick’s whim, Hannibal is at last presented with his mail, his only connection to the world outside. He is never certain he receives half of what is sent to him, and so treasures the crumbs that find their way to his table all the more.

This batch contains a few things of merit: page proofs for his forthcoming article in the  _Journal of Abnormal Psychology_  and an invitation to author the introduction to the next edition of  _The Joy of Cooking_  that he is almost certain is a joke. There are the usual interview requests and insipid letters from misguided women (and not a few men) who believe they can heal him with their love.

He reads everything, he always reads everything. And not just because he is bored.

At the bottom of the parcel, tucked behind the letters is a British newspaper,  _The Telegraph_. If a note accompanied the paper, it has since been lost or discarded. Glancing at the title page, Hannibal at first assumes some admirer has sent it to him because of the feature story on the British Museum’s new exhibit, “The Ripper’s London.” There’s not much to the piece, merely the same old conspiracy theories everyone has heard before along with some social commentary about class disparity and gender violence in the late Victorian Age.

Hannibal dutifully keeps reading, past cricket scores and celebrity gossip until he reaches the birth announcements. What he sees there leaves him breathless.

HART

_On November 1, 2015 at St. Mary’s Hospital to Dr. Beatrix Hart (née Fell) of Oxfordshire, a daughter, Lucy Mirabel._

A daughter. Lucy Mirabel.

His daughter.  _Lucy Mischa_.

Hannibal’s hands tremble as he smooths out the wrinkled newspaper. He angles his face away from the BSHCI’s ever-watchful cameras—he does not want them to see the tears glistening in his eyes. He would never give up this most precious of secrets. His lost daughter, the jewel of his heart, glowing like a ruby, even brighter than Mischa.

He has wondered many times what had become of Bedelia. In his darker moments he had despaired. That she had not been able to carry the pregnancy to term. That she had shrewdly reconsidered and terminated the pregnancy on her own, unwilling to bear the child of a cannibal and a killer. And in more bittersweet moments, he had pictured her, heavy with child, beautiful face flush, hair glossy and thick, her whole body ripening like a pomegranate. How much he would have liked to have been there to rub her feet when they ached, to embrace her and feel the child kick beneath his fingers. It was said that some women became sexually insatiable during the throes of pregnancy—would that have been his cool, restrained Bedelia? Would she have craved stranger things—raw meats and sweetbreads, those special dishes she had once declined that only he knew how to prepare?

He closes his eyes and strolls the corridors of his memory palace. It is no longer the ordered space it once was, the Normal Chapel in all its unchanging Byzantine splendor. In the months since his incarceration, since he lost Bedelia and their child became a question mark, new wings have appeared. Their Escher-like and Dada-esque vaults are not built with the solid brick of memory but spun from gossamer what-ifs and cobweb silk might-have-beens.

The ground ripples beneath his feet in those chambers as he tries to imagine his daughter’s face.

Would she have Bedelia’s golden curls and his own red-brown eyes? His own dark hair and her mother’s steely blue gaze? Or some unpredictable genetic permutation?

It is not enough to imagine. He has to draw them.

Hannibal takes out the soft charcoal pencil and sketch paper that his model behavior has earned him and begins to draw. He adopts Botticelli’s  _Madonna of the Book_  as inspiration, a painting he visited often during his youth. Kneeling before the golden Virgin in his memory palace conjures Bedelia’s face, angular and imperious. He softens her sharp gaze, smooths out the worry lines that so often creased her forehead in those last few months together.

Lucy, the child, is much harder to capture. He alters the image slightly, exposing Bedelia’s right breast. Lucy’s rosebud lips suckle as a chubby fist grasps creamy flesh. Bedelia’s expression is one of calm contentment as she regards the infant in her arms, hand ghosting over the book, a symbol of the knowledge she had so fervently sought. The two of them are bathed in a perfect circle of light, in a world of their own. His heart aches that he is not a part of it. May never be a part of it.

That night in Wolf Trap found him ensnared between the man who had vowed never to try to find him and the woman who would not let herself be found. At the time, Hannibal had chosen what seemed to be the least terrible choice.

Somewhere in the echoing vault of his memory palace a teacup shatters again.

“What have you drawn for me today, Hannibal?” Frederick Chilton asks, like a parent of a particularly precocious kindergartner. Hannibal had been so lost in the whirlpool of his own regret he had not noticed his jailer’s approach.

He never lets Frederick rile him and will not start today. “Botticelli’s  _Madonna del Libro_. Perhaps the finest Marian painting he ever completed. I only wish I had the materials to properly do it justice,” Hannibal says, eyes barely glancing up from his drawing.

“I see,” Frederick says, “And is it just me or does Our Lady bear a striking resemblance to the late Bedelia Du Maurier?”

“It’s not just you.” Hannibal allows himself a small smile. “I miss her.”

“Shame that you ate her then.”

“The finest meal I ever had.” It’s not a lie, really. He’s very particular about the way she tastes.

He hears the click of Frederick’s shoes as the man draws closer to the glass for a better view. “That’s a rather risqué interpretation of the Madonna and Child, Hannibal. I don’t believe it’s customary to have the Virgin’s  _assets_  so prominently on display…it’s almost perverse,” he says with a matronly cluck.

“The breast is only sexualized in our modern Western culture. There are many traditional societies throughout the world where an exposed breast is no more remarkable than an exposed ankle.”

“But you did not grow up in a so-called ‘traditional society,’ Hannibal. Did you have sexual feelings for the late Dr. Du Maurier?”

“She was an uncommonly beautiful woman. Didn’t you?” Hannibal flicks his eyes up, and holds Frederick’s gaze with a serenity he knows the other finds unsettling.

Frederick smiles as best as he is able with his prosthetic jaw—it comes out more like a grimace. “Now. now, Hannibal. No answering questions with other questions. You’re my patient—I’m not yours. I wouldn’t want to get the impression you are being uncooperative with your therapy—I might need to reconsider some of the privileges you have been granted here.” He gestures toward Hannibal’s books, his drawings and correspondence, the little luxuries that make his imprisonment the least bit bearable. “Now why don’t you tell me why your former psychiatrist is on your mind today?”

Hannibal sighs inwardly and realizes he will have to throw Frederick some kind of psychological bone. He begins to draw a window in the background behind Bedelia overlooking a rose garden. “I am remembering something she once said, a pearl of wisdom she deigned to share with me. I dismissed it as paste at the time.”

“Go on,” Frederick says, practically salivating.

He finishes the background and deepens the chiaroscuro shading around the folds of her robe. In his mind’s eye, it is a deep lapis blue, instead of grey, like her eyes when she is happy, like the Florentine sky at twilight. “She theorized that the reason so many male serial killers like myself pursue transformation through violence is because as men we are denied the transformation women have access to as a matter of biology. Women’s bodies wax and wane, monthly, yearly, in a constant state of change.”

“Interesting, if quaintly gender essentialist. I wouldn’t have pegged Dr. Du Maurier as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival type.” He’s pretending indifference, but Hannibal would be willing to bet large sums of money such plagiarized insight will make its way into Frederick’s next round on the Sunday morning talk show circuit.

“Women bleed, but do not die, she said. They can nourish another life without being consumed.” He begins to sketch stars around Bedelia’s head, crowning her with the heavens. “A mother’s flesh is given willingly,” Hannibal says quietly, the catch noticeable in his voice.

“So we are cannibals all, at least in the womb.”

“Bedelia seemed to think so.”

“Did that insight cost Dr. Du Maurier her life?”

Hannibal sighs theatrically. “We tired of one another. Her insights had grown stale.”

Frederick paces slowly before the glass, a hound who has caught the scent of a fox. “Hannibal, Hannibal, Hannibal,” he says, “I admit I will never approach your genius, but I’m not nearly as dumb as you think I am. I do not think your selection of Bedelia Du Maurier as your Madonna is in any way coincidental.”

“Do enlighten me.” Hannibal sets aside his pencil and folds his hands, expectant.

“Twelve years of Catholic education, Hannibal. The Dominicans were light on inquiry but heavy on catechism. Mary, the mother of God, is the only human ever welcomed into heaven, body and soul. Christ could not bear to let death corrupt his Mother.”

“The Mystery of the Assumption.” Hannibal had never pegged Frederick as a cradle Catholic, but really it explained so much, from the social climbing to the stench of self-loathing that he wore like a cologne. “God also created Mary without sin—Bedelia Du Maurier had plenty of that, I assure you.”

“Hannibal, is Dr. Du Maurier still alive?” Frederick asks, voice deadly quiet.

Hannibal grips his pencil imperceptibly and feels a single bead of sweat slide down his back, but never lets his pulse get above that blessed number of eighty-five. “I killed her, Frederick. I ate her. I invite you to dose me with sodium amytal again if you don’t believe me.”

“Yes, we tried that once before. We asked you where her body was and you gave us a recipe for  _tarte aux cerises_ …which more and more seems to me like a very filthy joke on your part.”

“She was always very sweet,” Hannibal quips, deadpan.

“Perhaps you were so enamored of her, you had to let her go—the only woman who could ever match you. Or,” Frederick says, grinning wickedly, “maybe she left  _you_?”

The comments genuinely sting because they are both so true. He could hide the hurt in his eyes, but instead decides to reveal it. “Bedelia Du Maurier is dead, Frederick. I’ll never see her again, except in my memory palace.”

Frederick registers the truth in his lies, but Hannibal can tell he has roused his keeper’s suspicions. “I will need to see that drawing if you are done with it for further analysis.”

Frederick may be a second-rate doctor but he has always been a first-class sadist, never passing up a chance to oversalt Hannibal’s wounds. Hannibal’s lips quiver for a moment, nearly tempted to protest. He does not want to part with them so soon. Instead he calmly looks over his drawing, lets his fingertips ghost over Bedelia’s graphite curls and the child’s apple cheeks. He memorizes every curve and angle before tucking the image away, safe inside his memory palace. He neatly folds the paper in half and slides it into the food slot. “Of course. Please be careful not to smudge it.”

Frederick takes the drawing and tucks it into his clipboard, unable to conceal his disappointment at Hannibal’s lack of disappointment. “I will be studying this very closely. Good day, Hannibal.”

*****

For the next few hours before lights out, Hannibal goes about his routine with as much dignity as he can muster imprisoned. He reads one of his favorite academic journals and answers his correspondence. He eats the Dickensian gruel the BSHCI considers food and removes his uniform, neatly folding it before climbing into bed. He is careful not to touch the newspaper again, though the announcement flashes before his eyes in block capitals.

When at last the lights are off, Hannibal turns on his side, face to the wall, at an angle he is sure Frederick’s cameras cannot capture. He closes his eyes and lets himself wander those strange new halls of his memory palace. There is a stone house with a wooden door and cobalt blue clapboard shutters on the outskirts of a city of dreaming spires. It has a garden with a riot of pale pink wild roses. He walks in the house and climbs the stairs, vague and flickering in the firmament of his dreams. There is a sun-filled room at the top of the stairs, and in the room there is a bed, and in the bed there is his wife and their child. He crawls in bed beside them. Lucy nursing at her mother’s breast regards him with wide watchful dark eyes. Her small child’s fist grasps his finger and it is like a beam of white hot light straight to his heart. He embraces Bedelia embracing their child, and Bedelia smiles at him, happy in a way he never made her in this life.

It is real, so very real, realer than a memory. And then it collapses around him, the vision snuffed out like a candle, leaving him alone in the shadows again.

Puccini fills his ears and tears roll down both cheeks. And he weeps in silence for all he has gained and all he has lost.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry that I can only write Murder Baby in the most angsty way possible. 
> 
> The Telegraph birth announcements are a thing of joy forever and perhaps contain the most pretentiously named children on the planet. 
> 
> Botticelli's [Madonna of the Book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_of_the_Book) is a beautiful painting and I think the most Bedelia-esque of all his Madonnas.


End file.
